London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

The Coalition and its tuition fee timebomb

Nick Clegg may be disappointed with the Liberal Democrats’ latest dire poll ratings — just nine per cent, despite his apology last month for agreeing to bring in tuition fees. But the long-term damage from making students pay so much more — to the public finances and those of the middle classes — will be far worse.

Just how toxic was the decision to replace most public funding for university teaching with annual fees of up to £9,000 was underlined by a report yesterday from the Higher Education Policy Institute. The Government’s sums simply don’t add up.

For a start, ministers grossly under-estimated the number of universities that would charge the full fee, thereby miscalculating the total weight of the loans borne by government for decades as students repay them.

They were also over-optimistic on the salaries graduates will command: those students will take longer to pay, and a higher proportion of the debts, 37 per cent, will never be recovered at all. As Cambridge professor Stefan Collini has warned, even the most optimistic Treasury estimates said it would take 30 years to recoup about 70 per cent of the total. Other analysts think they will be lucky to recover more than half.

And ministers appear to have forgotten the impact of loan repayments on the Consumer Price Index, with its knock-on effect on benefits and pensions.

The total black hole, the report warns, is more than £1 billion a year. Except perhaps in the very long term, the scheme is not going to save money, its ostensible purpose. Indeed it will probably cost taxpayers more.

But that extra cost will be as nothing compared with the personal burdens. This isn’t merely a problem for the young people who have just started college and will leave in 2015 owing £27,000. It’s an assault on — mostly middle-class — living standards, putting a drag on people’s finances into their thirties and forties, as they start families themselves

We are heading towards the US model. Universities minister David Willetts may not realise what this means but I do, having completed a PhD in the US in the 1990s. Most of my contemporaries are now academics with young families — and they are all already desperately saving. One friend, a tenured professor at a top US university, admits: “I have considered changing jobs to an employer that helps cover kids’ college costs because the sum of money involved is so large.”

The annual fees at my alma mater, Duke University, are $43,623 (or about £111,000 for a four-year course). That’s more than here but does anyone seriously think top UK universities will not keep pushing for ever-higher fees?

What Clegg and Cameron have set in motion for the middle-class British families of the future will demand more than a simple apology.

Our ministers are beyond satire

Listening to health minister Anna Soubry explain the Government’s feeble new food-labelling scheme on Wednesday’s Today programme, I realised: The Thick of It has simply made it impossible to take most ministers seriously. Ousted party leader Nicola Murray, world-weary minister Peter Mannion and spin doctor Malcolm Tucker may be gone, following the series’ end last weekend. But who needs it when we’ve got George Osborne’s attempt to blag a first-class rail seat live-tweeted by a nearby journalist?

Then came a cack-handed U-turn on badgers by Environment Secretary Peter Mannion… sorry, Owen Paterson. Even the PM has been pratfalling Murray-style, letting slip yesterday’s growth figures a day early. Maybe it’s the 24-hour media pressure. Maybe it’s a Government that’s just out of gas. Either way, this most biting of satires has rendered Westminster reality a farce.

Boris must not renege on his cycling pledge

ONE positive aspect of this year’s mayoral election was the high profile of cycling, thanks largely to an effective push by the London Cycling Campaign. Its call for Dutch-style cycle lanes and junctions was at least partially endorsed by all major candidates. So it’s disappointing that Boris Johnson’s only cycling initiative since May has been a plan to extend the Barclays bike hire scheme in south-west London — and his talking up of a hare-brained proposal for elevated “SkyCycle” tracks, quietly dropped last week.

We don’t need cycle lanes in the sky: we need them on our roads. And we need killer junctions to be made safe — as the Mayor promised after two fatalities at Bow roundabout last year. Yet as Danny Williams’s Cyclists in the City blog points out, Transport for London’s junction review still seems to be driven mainly by concern for drivers’ convenience. Many of the proposed junction changes are deeply flawed (you can comment on them at bit.ly/RXEwxT).

Already 11 London cyclists have been killed this year. How many more must die before Boris gets into gear?

Good riddance to a rubbish cab

The lurch into administration this week of the sole traditional black-cab manufacturer, Manganese Bronze, has prompted predictable wailing about the threat to this London icon. Ask your next cabbie and you may get a less sentimental view. Actually, you might not want to get them started.

The cab’s current model, the TX4, draws cabbies’ ire for its cost (typically more than £40,000, with financing) and poor reliability — it was a recall for a steering fault that finally pushed the company under. Add in the pollution (diesel particulates and as much CO2 as a 4.4 litre Range Rover) and this may be an icon we can do without.